From Beyond the Grave
by Crazylobo
Summary: An accidental discovery draws proud, logical, and lonely Weiss Schnee to a series of supernatural murders and an ultimatum. "Choose, Weiss: duty," Weiss held her breath as the finger moved to point at Ruby, "or desire?" [Supernatural AU] [M for explicit sexual content] [White Rose, Bumblebee]


**From Beyond the Grave**

A RWBY fanfiction by Crazylobo

An accidental discovery draws proud, logical, and lonely Weiss Schnee to a series of supernatural murders and an ultimatum. _"Choose, Weiss: duty," Weiss held her breath as the finger moved to point at Ruby, "or desire?"_ [Supernatural AU] [M for explicit sexual content] [White Rose, Bumblebee]

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><p><strong>Chapter 1: Marked for Death<strong>

If a colour could be associated with bad luck, Weiss thinks hers might be black.

Glancing to her side, the heiress found herself entertaining a childish thought, and sighed. But no matter how many times she squeezed her eyes shut and reopened them, the silhouette of a trenchcoat pacing silently beside her remained there stubbornly.

The Faunus must have caught on to her little game, for her shoulders rose and fell in a dramatic sigh.

"Stop sighing!" Weiss said, flicking her side-ponytail backwards in irritation.

"Isn't the pot calling the kettle black?"

"If things had gone my way, I wouldn't be here working with you."

"So we _can_ agree on something." The Faunus smirked, and Weiss is reminded of a cat with the canary and cream on the side. She glared back.

"Don't test me. I know what you are." Weiss did not miss the way the other's shoulders stiffened and drew together or how her mouth thinned to a line.

"And?"

"I read your file. You're a _Faunus_," Weiss almost spat the word out, "and the world doesn't need more riffraff like you. An animal like you should never have made it into Beacon." Weiss walked ahead of the other, not deigning to look back.

"A spoiled little girl like you should never have tried to leave her gilded golden cage and bribed your way into Beacon." There was quiet vehemence in the other's voice and she responded to it, whirling around to face her.

"How dare you! For your information, I passed the entrance exam with flying colours! But you got in only with recommendations! Who's the one who bribed her way in now?!"

"What does it matter to you how I got in? That isn't the real problem, and you know it!"

"You're right. The problem is that _you're_ my assigned colleague! I shouldn't have to work with a _Faunus_. Not when the White Fang has haunted my family's company for so many years." Weiss hated how her shrill her voice sounded despite her attempts at keeping it level.

The heiress watched as hard, searching golden eyes softened to pale yellow at the mention of her family. After a visible struggle, the other deliberately inhaled, then exhaled, and turned away to look at the houses a distance away from Weiss.

"You can't blame every Faunus for the sins committed by the White Fang."

"Does it matter? All I've ever seen Faunus do in my life is lie, cheat, murder, and steal. There wasn't a day that went by where I wasn't afraid for my life, or that of my loved ones."

The Faunus reacted most curiously. Facing the direction of the cool night wind, she remained silent, mouth slightly open as she stared off into the distance.

"Hey! Were you listen-!?" The other raised a hand, as if to cut her off.

Years of fencing had left her with an innate ability to read body language, and she could see the lines of tension running through the other's frame. Sensing that something was amiss, she pushed past the burn of irritation to whisper a furious, "I won't forget about this!" before reaching for Myrtenaster's comforting weight.

Hunted amber eyes flick towards her before flicking back up ahead, and she followed the other's gaze to what looked like a house, poorly lit by the pale light of the full moon. The windows of the house were dark, and the house itself sat in the middle of two streetlights, and while her colleague was Faunus, she was not, and all she could make out was a quaint white picket fence and the concrete porch.

It wasn't unusual for the windows to be dark at this hour, but the heiress thinks it almost uncanny how the cry of crickets and katydids seemed to have quietened, as if they too, had noticed that something was amiss.

The Faunus moved like quicksilver, leaping over the fence and slinking to the porch before rapping sharply on the door three times.

"Hello? This is Blake Belladonna of Beacon Detective Academy. Open up." The Faunus's voice was professional, almost like the unsheathed form of Gambol Shroud in her hand. Only Weiss noticed the slight tremor on the other's hands, carefully hidden behind a cold façade.

Weiss narrowed her eyes and primly vaulted over the picket fence to join the other. She winced at the clack of her heels against the concrete floor. It was unnaturally loud to her ears in the absence of crickets and katydids.

"Open up, please. You have ten seconds to respond before I break the door down."

After a count to ten, the other motioned with her hands. Weiss scowled, a hand resting on one hip.

"I don't need you to tell me what to do." Despite her words, the heiress shifted her stance and unsheathed Myrtenaster. She spun the Dust chamber to red, the clockwork of the Dust mechanism moving with tiny clicks. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the Faunus take cover as she thrust Myrtenaster forward in a complex series of motions.

The door shattered with a loud crash, sending a shower of splinters everywhere. When the dust cloud had settled, the Faunus was no longer by her side.

"Hello?" Weiss's voice cracked mid-syllable as she walked past the door frame. A small rectangular piece of moonlight was framed on the floor, helping Weiss to pick her way through the splinters as she waited for her eyes to adjust.

Then she saw it. A silhouette moving to her right, near the staircase. Gripping Myrtenaster tightly, she ran through familiar fencing motions in her mind as she scoured the darkness, cursing her lack of night vision, and switched her Dust chamber to freezing blue. She was relying only on her hearing, and she felt frustration bubble within her as she realized she could hardly hear past the loud pounding of her own heart. Shifting into a battle stance, she tried to move as swiftly and silently as she could with heels, before she saw the shadow's head _wiggle_.

She knew of only one who wiggled their ears like that, and she breathed a loud sigh of relief as she straightened, heart still hammering. If her collea – no, if the Faunus was headed to the bedroom upstairs, she was left with only the well-lit kitchen.

She was still unsure of what she was facing, only that the source of the alarm had been enough for her to break protocol and investigate without a warrant. Long, tense seconds dragged into minutes, and yet, Weiss found nothing that could have caused the Faunus alarm. The anxiety was infectious, it seemed to her: Weiss was unable to shake off the deep sense of foreboding.

Just as the tension began to leave her shoulders, she felt a hand grab her shoulder, and she whirled around with a cry, Myrtenaster drawn and blade pressed against her assailant's throat.

"Weiss! Weiss, it's me, it's just me." The Faunus did not appear surprised at her reaction, holding up her hands in surrender. "Sorry for startling you."

"You careless twat! I nearly killed you!" Weiss hissed as she lowered her weapon. "Ugh, don't ever do that again. They'll never believe I accidentally skewer –"

"You need to come see this." The Faunus shook her head, as if in apology, and began walking out of the kitchen and back up the stairs, towards the bedroom. After a moment of hesitation, she too, followed.

The bedroom was bathed in silver, crevasses of black intermingled with shades of grey. The bed took up the middle of the room, sheets neatly folded, and a small desk sat at the corner of the room adjacent to the window, its surface gleaming but for a black hunched figure slumped over it, unmoving and still.

Weiss forced herself to take in a shuddering gasp.

She had thought herself numb to death. But no matter how many times she experienced it, the pain was never any less sharp.

Glancing around to make sure that the room really was empty, Myrtenaster still drawn and ready, Weiss staggered to her companion's side, careful to avoid the broken mirror shards on the floor. As she approached, she was filled with pity for the other. Their keen sense of smell must have alerted them to the body earlier, when the wind blew in their direction.

"Doppelganger," the Faunus broke the silence with an answer to her unspoken question. "He was strangled, perhaps a few hours ago." The other's eyes glowed fiery gold under the moonlight as she indicated the victim's neck, and the heiress could just make out the abrasions, shaped like human hands. The victim himself sat face down, one of his hands clutching the handle of a broken hand mirror, and the other frozen in a claw-like motion underneath his head.

She shook her head and reached deep inside herself for that familiar wall of ice. She could do this. The other was all help she would get for now. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves from her own ivory coat pocket, and, after a moment of deliberation, tossed another pair to the side.

"So prepared? If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were responsible for all this," the Faunus teased, catching the gloves with one hand as the other remained halfway to her own pocket for her own pair of gloves.

"Shut up." She has never taken teasing well. "This looks and sounds like a suicide case. I'll do a background check to find out why he might have committed suicide. You'd better search the body."

"Sure."

Weiss reached for her scroll and activated it. The Faunus held the victim's face to her as she photographed the victim and searched Beacon's comprehensive database for similar hits, and she watched out of the corner of her eye as her partner closed the victim's eyes.

"I found something." The other's voice brought her back to the present, and she moved to stand beside the other.

Carefully manicured nails moved moved the victim's head, stiff from rigor mortis for her to see. "I don't remember moles looking this intricate," said Weiss.

"It's not a mole. Moles aren't shaped like fire emblems."

"It could be important. Photograph it."

As the Faunus filed a photograph of the black mark away, Weiss's scroll pinged, and she nearly dropped it in her rush to access the victim's identity.

_Quartz Smith_

_Age: 33_

_Occupation: Supply chain manager at Schnee Dust Corporation (SDC)_

"This guy worked for you?" The Faunus said, stepping back a respectable distance after she had finished reading beside her.

"Apparently. The Schnee Dust Corporation has many employees." Weiss bit her lip. Another one, and this time she had not even known who he was. "Why would the supply chain manager at the SDC commit suicide? He had one of the highest salaries in the company, and further reviews on him by other employees painted him as an enthusiastic if eccentric man," wondered Weiss.

"Family problems perhaps?"

"He had none."

"That crosses out the family as potential murderers," her partner said, and Weiss nodded. "It doesn't explain why he hadn't reported the crime or the ransom note to us or the Vale's police forces."

"He must have known that he would have been silenced the minute he reported it." Weiss exhaled, remembering some of the deals she had watched her father make in exchange for keeping the Schnee Dust Corporation alive. There were many – too many – who would do anything to bring down her family's legacy.

As the Faunus carefully turned the body over to examine the chest portion for additional marks, a small, crumpled piece of paper fell from his coat pocket and floated to the floor.

Weiss met the Faunus's eyes and shrugged. Thinking that it could not be anything more important than a shopping list or at best, a torrid love letter, she bent down and reached for it. Beside her, out of the corner of her eye, her partner leaned in as she unfolded the note, crinkling the paper.

Scrawled in black ink with a flourish, the note read,

_Deliver 100 tonnes of Dust to the Docks, or your life is forfeit four nights before the moon waxes._

"I guess you were wrong. This isn't a suicide case after all. He was murdered." The Faunus said, her voice free of emotion.

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><p>She sat in a daze.<p>

The weight of the note felt leaden in her pocket, the words written on it echoing in her mind as she turned it over in her head again and again. She would need to ask her forensics team to analyse the ink for traceability. Most of all, she was bothered because she could not discern the motives of the killer.

It did not make sense.

The supernatural entities known as Grimm did commit murder on occasion, but this was the first time she had ever heard of one leaving ransom notes. And why Dust? The Grimm had no need for Dust, and covert operations like this by Grimm were nearly unheard of. Should the Grimm steal, surely it would have been better and easier to rob a Dust store than to murder an innocent?

But without any further evidence, Weiss could only turn the potential motives in her head, unable to settle on a conclusion.

_And_, Weiss rubbed her temples in frustration,_ this is where we are at at the moment._ The incorporeal nature of the supernatural Grimm often made investigations difficult, occasionally nigh impossible, and thus, only the best were hired as detectives at Beacon.

They were at the mortuary section of Vale's hospital, having called the ambulance to transport the body over for an autopsy. Weiss closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, having begun to feel the first dredges of fatigue after the adrenaline burst earlier. She glanced to her side, squinting in the harsh glare of the white hospital lights, but found that the other remained alert, pacing the halls.

"How do you do that?" The heiress asked, gesturing vaguely.

"Walk? Well, usually I do it with two legs, the way you humans do."

So she hadn't been forgiven for her sentiments towards the Faunus just yet. The heiress sighed. "You are a complete moron. That was a serious question that I asked you. How in Vale are you still so energetic even after everything that's happened?"

The Faunus fell silent in contemplation, and it was a short moment before she answered.

"…Death was a large part of my previous job. It was sickening the first few times, but you get numb to it after a while," she answered solemnly.

Weiss didn't really know how to respond to that, and shifted uncomfortably on her seat, crossing her legs and arms.

"Honestly, I'm not sure what to think any more with that ransom note. I've never heard of coordinated Grimm attacks." The Faunus must have sensed the awkwardness, breaking the ensuing silence with a hurried comment that seemed to capture all that had been haunting Weiss's mind.

"Neither have I. It reeks of suspicion."

"I agree."

The Faunus inclined her head in reply, and a cavernous silence fell across the room as the other stood still in contemplation.

"Hey. Do you remember what you said earlier, about the victim being silenced?" Golden eyes swivelled to meet hers.

"Yes. What about it?"

"Since we discovered the body, it's likely that we'll be their next target, considering that you're the heiress to the Schnee Dust Company. What will you do next?"

"Don't worry about me," she snapped, "I'll be fine." Of course this had occurred to her, but she wasn't about to share her next plan of action with her Faunus colleague.

She didn't have time to, even if she had wanted it – the ear-splitting scream that ripped through the silence chilled her to the bone.

As she rushed towards the source of the sound, sense alert and tingling, she hoped fervently that it wasn't another person that would be killed in her name.

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><p><strong>Author's note:<strong>

Here's to my first multi-chaptered fanfiction! I plan for updates to occur biweekly and for them to occur on Friday. Thank you for reading – please leave a review if you liked or disliked the story, and let me know what you thought of it!

**Disclaimer:**

RWBY (pronounced 'Rue-bee') is the intellectual property of Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth. I own neither the series nor its wonderful characters, but gleefully take credit for torturing them nonetheless.


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